Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements [LWN.net]

Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

Posted Oct 12, 2006 11:22 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
In reply to: Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements by drag
Parent article: Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

>Hardware by definition is propriatory, there is no way around it.

This is my point: if you don't like the definition, and find it insurmountable, *then change it*.
While I wouldn't contend that it's likely that the F/OSS community can beat nVidia or ATI head-on in a graphics shoot-out, hopefully the Open-Graphics effort will culminate in something that runs 2d graphics at reasonable resolution.
I realize that some people are deeply into games, and there will always be an nVidia to push them 31337 hardware.
Others, however, see the compiler as the ultimate game...

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Device drivers and non-disclosure agreements

Posted Oct 12, 2006 13:44 UTC (Thu) by grahammm (subscriber, #773) [Link]

Hardware (or rather the interface to it) does not have to be proprietary. Take UARTS for example. There are a vast number of UARTs, whether discrete or emulated in FGPA etc, or even the interfaces to GSM etc modules, which use the register interface originally used by the NatSemi 8250 - often with the 16550 FIFO extensions. Similarly up to and including VGA, the register interface to video cards was standard across manufacturers.